Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Tushnet: Legal Scholarship In the Law Reviews

Rank is a convenient shortcut for review on the merits. That and like likes like probably explain much of law review article "placement", which, like the law school rankings game in admissions continues through one's career. It is easy to understand why the easy road is taken by student editors. They are inexperienced and pressed for time, after all.Harvard con law prof Mark Tushnet notes that two recent submissions of his got no offers. (Didn't they realize he is a Big Name and blow their chance to land him/it?) So he has this interesting post about how the usual rank-based vetting process does not end with cream always on the top.I have been through that competitive process a handful of times. But the most important was the Yale Law Journal, whose blind review yielded acceptance of my draft, apparently indifferent to my ivy-less credentials as partner in Tulipan & Conk, P.C., South Orange, NJ, my law school lowly Rutgers (People's Electric), and my academic rank - adjunct at another "second tier" school - Seton Hall. - GWCBalkinization: Legal Scholarship (1): In the Law Reviews:by Mark Tushnet

On the plane today I read a terrific article, Brannon Denning and Michael Kent, Anti-Evasion Doctrines in Constitutional Law, 2012 Utah Law Review 1773. (And you should read it too.) Without (I hope) casting aspersions on the Utah Law Review, whose editors had the discernment to see the article's quality, I was struck by its "under"placement relative to its quality. Professor Denning tells me that they did a general submission, and Utah was the only offer they received. What might account for this?....."